The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals: A Book of Personal ObservationsHornaday, William T. (William Temple)
Science
The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals: A Book of Personal Observations
Hornaday, William T. (William Temple)
Animal behavior
Now, let us look for a moment into the house-building intelligence
and skill of some of the lower tribes of men. Out of the multitude
of exhibits available I will limit myself to three, widely
separated. In the first place, the habitations of the savage and
barbaric tribes are usually the direct result of their own mental
and moral deficiencies. The Eskimo is an exception, because his
home and its location are dictated by the hard and fierce
circumstances which dictate to him what he must do. Often he is
compelled to move as his food supply moves. The Cliff-Dweller
Indian of the arid regions of the Southwest was forced to cliff-
dwell, in order to stave off extermination by his enemies. Under
that spur he became a wonderful architect and engineer.
For present purposes we are concerned with three savage tribes
which might have been rich and prosperous agriculturists or
herdsmen had they developed sufficient intelligence to see the
wisdom of regular industry.
Consider first the lowest of three primitive tribes that inhabit
the extreme southern point of Patagonia, whose real estate
holdings front on the Strait of Magellan. That region is treeless,
rocky, windswept, cold and inhospitable. I can not imagine a place
better fitted for an anarchist penal colony. North of it lie
plains less rigorous, and by degrees less sterile, and finally
there are lands quite habitable by cattle-and-crop-growing men.
But those three tribes elect to stick to the worst spot in South
America. The most primitive is the tribe of "canoe Indians" of
Tierra del Fuego, which probably represents the lowest rung of the
human ladder. Beside them the cave men of 30,000 years ago were
kings and princes. Their only rivals seem to be the Poonans of
Central Borneo, who, living in a hot country, make no houses or
shelters of any kind, and have no clothing but a long strip of
bark cloth around the loins.
The Fuegians have long been known to mariners and travellers. They
inhabit a region that half the year is bleak, cold and raw, but
they make nothing save the rudest of the rude in canoes--of rough
slabs tied together and caulked _with moss,_--and rough bone-
pointed spears, bows, arrows and paddles. Their only clothing
consists of skins of the guanacos loosely hung from the neck, and
flapping over the naked and repulsive body. They make no houses,
and on shore their only shelters from the wind and snow and
chilling rains are rabbit-like forms of brush, broken off by hand.
These people are lower in the scale of intelligence than any wild
animal species known to me; for they are mentally too dull and low
to maintain themselves on a continuing basis. Their hundred years
of contact with man has taught them little; and numerically they
are decreasing so rapidly that the world will soon see the
absolute finish of the tribe.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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